Tapped Out
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
ATF agents and Philadelphia narcotics detectives had spent two years building a case against a rap music entrepreneur who they believed was running a $25 million drug ring - one of Philadelphia's largest. People connected to drug deals, shootings, and murders seemed to work for him, but investigators needed more evidence.
Shortly after 4 p.m. on Jan. 20, 2005, Joe Smith was found riddled with bullets in the backseat of an SUV at a Getty station in Southwest Philadelphia.
Smith, a barrel-chested, 30-year-old drug dealer, had been shot 20 times in the chest, abdomen, arms, legs, back and pelvis. Two shots perforated his right lung. Another shot, fired from a gun pressed against his back, sliced through his liver and right kidney.
Before he died, Smith named the man who had shot him.
The homicide, one of the first of 380 that year in Philadelphia, received scant attention - one paragraph in The Inquirer, no mention at all in the Philadelphia Daily News.
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